Hot Times for Hype and Hysterics

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” said Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, summing up so much of the “collective wisdom” that prevails in the world today. Some claim it originated before his time, but he’s one of my favourite boyhood authors so I’ll go with him; nowhere is it more apt than with the Western world’s current obsession with “climate change”.

According to recent calls by the Greens, some alarmist scientists, globalist leaders from the United Nations  and World Economic Forum, we should all become “climate activists” to save the world from “an era of global boiling.”

We saw the fruit of that hyperbolic fear-mongering this past week, with Extinction Rebellion getting the jollies by snarling traffic with blockades and slow marches. Weeks before that, thousands of school students took part in a “climate action” strike under the guise of “A sick day for a sick planet.” The sickest aspect was a “sick note” provided by University of Melbourne Professor David Karoly and ANU’s Professor Nick Abel which stated

The student is ‘unfit’ to attend school as the government’s inaction on climate change has caused ‘increased anxiety’ among other ‘symptoms’.

‘levated stress on seeing the impacts of the climate emergency now in Australia and worldwide…’Feelings of despair due to the disregard of leaders who won’t have to endure the future they’ll leave behind.

What perpetual alarmists such as Karoly don’t acknowledge is that repeated warnings of “catastrophic climate change” pushed by educators, governments and a headline-hungry media is responsible for that “increased anxiety”, rather than any tangible evidence of a rapidly warming climate. All this is based on dodgy computer modelling and an unproven hypothesis that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are responsible, rather than natural cyclical changes.

Despite the headlines, nothing we have seen in the past decade is “unprecedented” . As Dorothea Mackellar eloquently pointed out in My Country, we are a land of droughts and flooding rains. There have been bigger floods, worse droughts, higher temperatures and more severe cyclones than any witnessed by young millennials or their parents, despite efforts by the Bureau of Meterology to expunge some historical records and “homogenise” temperature readings that stand out from an accepted average. This sleight of hand has been highlighted by Dr Jennifer Marohasy.

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 400 parts per million but has been much higher in eons past, where plants, animals and coral reefs survived and thrived. From Wikipedia:

Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere were as high as 4,000 ppm during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago, and as low as 180 ppm during the Quaternary glaciation of the last two million years.^[4]Reconstructed temperature records for the last 420 million years indicate that atmospheric CO2 concentrations peaked at approximately 2,000 ppm during the Devonian (400 Ma) period, and again in the Triassic (220–200 Ma) period and was four times current levels during the Jurassic period (201–145 Ma).

 And according to Catherine Salgado, of the US-based Media Research Center year,

Recently published data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that there has not been global warming for the past eight years. And NASA satellite data reportedly confirms that evidence, showing no global warming for eight years and five months … But leftists are quick to warn people against drawing the obvious conclusion that the world isn’t about to become a burning ball of fire.

Recently published evidence also showed that there was actually a near-record low of major hurricanes in 2022, indicating that weather isn’t getting progressively and exponentially worse globally, despite the climate frenzy of the media and governments. And the Northeast is currently experiencing record cold in a harsh winter…

So before we buy a few tubes of superglue to anchor ourselves to a busy city street or catch a flight to Paris or London, where we can deface Van Gough and Picasso art works to “save the planet,” it’s worth taking a step back to ponder some other dire warnings. Let’s start with Dr David Viner, of the University of East Anglia, who prophesied in 2000 that “within a few years winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event..Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Less than a decade later, former US Vice-President Al Gore predicted sea levels could rise by seven metres “in the near future”. His movie “An Inconvenient Truth”  included scenes from a science fiction movie, and the day before an announcement that he was a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a British High Court judge ruled that his much-celebrated movie contained nine significant errors. Gore, who subsequently bought a 20-room mansion that reportedly “guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years” has done well indeed by promoting needless panic, as have legions of professional alarmists.

Former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd warned “climate change is the great moral challenge of our time” before jetting off to a climate change talk-fest in Copenhagen where  delegates had to scramble home before the airport was snowed under. But the claimed sea level rise didn’t put him off purchasing a multi-million dollar beachfront mansion at Noosa’s Sunshine Beach a few years ago. If there is such a thing as poetic justice, he is currently experiencing just how cold a winter in America’s north-east can be as our Ambassador in Washington.

Professor Tim Flannery of the Climate Council  in 2007 claimed: “Even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams… ” Oops, keep trying, Tim, there are thousands of subsequent flood victims who might not believe you.

Back in the Seventies, scientists seemed unable to agree on whether we were entering a new ice age or global warming was about to ramp up. Here are just a few of the many dire — and dead wrong — warnings made after the first Earth Day in 1970:

Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years  unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

 “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” according to Washington University’s Barry Commoner, who apparently looks through his biologist’s microscope only with his left eye.

The New York Times, then poised on the very edge of the slippery slope that has since seen it plumb the depths of doctimaire silliness, had this to say: “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

The Times editorialist must have thought he was breaking new ground. He wasn’t. Way back in May 1932, the same newspaper made what, for my money, remains the most asinine climate prediction of all time:

As all the ice at the two poles melt, a stupendous volume of water will be released. Fish will swim in Buckingham Palace … the Sahara Desert will be a great inland sea … New York will be marked by taller skyscrapers … the climate will be as when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Well it hasn’t happened. I don’t think King Charles and Queen Camilla will need to vacate Buckingham Palace — and I won’t be buying any super glue unless something really needs mending, and that ain’t the climate.

John Mikkelsen is a former editor of three Queensland regional newspapers, columnist,  freelance writer and author of the Amazon Books Memoir, Don’t Call Me Nev